Captain America #2 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

When I turned to the first page, with its "One Year Later" dramatically printed on black, I admit that I gasped.  I wasn't expecting it and I instantly found myself pulled into the story that Remender planned on telling.  But, almost as quickly, I found myself worrying about continuity, wondering how Remender was going to get me to believe that the Captain America that I just saw in "Avengers" #2 had somehow been gone a year.  After reading comics for 30 years, I immediately figured that Remender would have to go "Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix" in the end:  Steve would raise a child, but he would leave him to his world and return to his own world mere moments after he left.

But, soon, Remender made me care less about the logistics.  Instead, he had me immersed in the story that he was actually telling, the story of a man protecting his son.  It was a poignant moment, to say the least.  After reading about Captain America for a long time, it's always been pretty clear that he never really saw himself as a father.  In fact, in the first issue of this series, he wonders if he can even be a husband.  Brubaker never really addressed the issue of the baby that Steve and Sharon lost as a result of the Red Skull.  I'm not even sure if Steve knows that Sharon was pregnant.  But, here, Steve is a father, falling into a role similar to the father in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," guiding his charge through an inhospitable landscape, unable to surrender in the face of adversity because of the overwhelming responsibility that he has to that child.  It makes the end all the more profound.  Is Remender going to kill Ian?  Remender seems to have put everything on the table here and I'm scared for Ian.  Moreover, is Steve's parenting of Ian going to push Steve closer to Sharon or further from her when he returns?  Remender is clearly building to that moment, given that he had Sharon propose in the first issue.  The fact that I don't know what the answer is going to be shows just how magic what Remender is doing here.

I haven't been all that impressed with a lot of the comics that I've been reading over the last few weeks.  Between Doctor Octopus becoming Spider-Man or the Joker suddenly making us all feel like idiots for ever believing that he hasn't known the identities of the Bat-family, it's all just felt...silly.  It's all been recycled plots without a lot of actual heart.  I'm not sure what Snyder wants me to be feeling when I read "Death of the Family," but I'm definitely not feeling it, whatever it is.  I was seriously contemplating just ditching a whole lot of titles, feeling the same sort of resignation that I felt right before I quit comics the last time.  But, not to overdo it, this issue actually reminded me why I like comics.  I can read a story about a guy stuck in another dimension, defending a child genetically manufactured from his own DNA from alien monsters, and be moved by the humanity that the hero shows.  Remender makes us care about the two people on the page here and the relationship that they have with one another and, at the end of the day, it's that dynamic that makes us all read comics.  It's not really seeing if we can figure out Joker's next steps or how Spidey is going to escape this particular trap.  I mean, it's part of the fun, but, if you miss that core reality -- that we're here for the relationships -- everything else feels hollow.  So, thanks, Rick Remender, for remembering that.